The year now ending has been one of immense alarm followed by serenity’s sudden rushes to the head. It is hard now to remember the hysteria generated by the tawdry and often appalling scandal of clerical abuse of young men in the Roman Catholic Church, between February and July. The New York Times appeared to be offering free visits to New York with city tours of all boroughs, capped by five-course dinners in five-star restaurants, for anyone who could recall an indiscreet clerical hand on the knee from decades before. I repeat it is a grievous problem and there were many disgusting and shameful incidents, compounded by excessive episcopal indulgence in many cases. These facts do not alter or diminish the fidelity, dedication, and self-discipline of the 99 percent of Roman Catholic religious personnel who have served through living memory throughout the world with unblemished devotion, nor blight the education and care they gave to an approximately equal percentage of the scores of millions of children confided to them.
All bad news for the Roman Catholic Church brings that Church’s enemies swarming out like hornets whose nest has just been squirted with a garden hose. To the litigators, the editorial mudslingers, the deep, thick, serried ranks of militant skepticism, Rome is a Satanic bumblebee which infests the brave, aging secular world of utilitarian progress and the methodical human march toward a plenitude of knowledge. Earlier this year, they thought they saw the end, at last, of Rome’s ghastly, tenebrous, saturnine magisterium that defies all laws of nature and reason by not simply crashing to the ground as the endlessly proclaimed laws of rational aerodynamics require. They were, as always, mistaken.
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The long-promised ecclesiastical fall of Rome was to be celebrated, like a spectacular crash at the great Farnborough Air Show, by the fiasco of Pope Benedict’s madly insouciant visit to Godless Britain to beatify the already Venerable Doctor John Henry Cardinal Newman in September. The allegedly dogmatic pope supposedly combined all the dislikes of the British caricaturist, commentator, and pub bore: Germanic, authoritarian, sophistical, pompous, superstitious, and curial. In the first half of 2010, the pope was reviled as complicit in the crime of hiding the molestations, and even as an ex-Nazi and a ruthless dogmatist. In his British visit, though, Benedict was seen as intellectually courageous, the quietly spoken wise man. He was apologetic for the Church’s failings, solicitous of its victims, indomitable in the championship of Christian faith, and reverently admiring of Newman, a quintessential Englishman and one of the intellectual giants and greatest English prose stylists of the 19th century. The pope did not put a Prada-clad foot wrong. Leftist pundits who had predicted huge outpourings of hostility were completely silenced, as the pope came and went in an ambiance of reciprocated good will in which all, including Queen Elizabeth, the prime minister, and the archbishop of Canterbury joined.
fedupwithidiots
12/17/10 18:17
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I am a former Catholic. I believed everything that the church of Rome said about everything Catholic.
Once, I think it was Pope John Paul XX111 said, prior to a trip to Sicily that he was going to ex-communicate all Mafia held in custody at that time. However, when he gave his sermon (speech), to the crowds in Sicily, he left out any reference to excommunication for the mafia.
At that point, I lost any credibility in the Pope and the church as a force for justice.............he cowed before the violence or the economic force/influence of the mafia worldwide, which, in my view made him a coward.
I was in my late thirties or early forties at the time and had been an iron clad catholic all my life. That cowardice on the Pope's part made me rethink my faith and I lost it.
Years later, longing for something spiritual in my life i turned to a small independent biblical baptist church and found JESUS in all of the glory that He deserves and the truths that I needed for my salvation. In the bible, His word, He comes across as the intimate friend that we all need. You may feel unloved or unworthy of His love, but DO NOT DESPAIR........He loves you even more because you are troubled in your faith........BELIEVE IN HIM. He does not want to lose you to eternal damnation; you are His brother or sister ..............He will, though, let you go to your doom if YOU choose to do so. Be very careful in your choices.
I HAVE NEVER LOOKED BACK.
aculeus
12/17/10 14:50
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The Times undoubtedly exaggerated the abuse but referring to the victims as "young men" is inaccurate.
This particular Irish abuser named Walsh, is cited as abusing an 11-year old:
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mattman26
12/16/10 11:42
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Well done, sir!
Mack
12/16/10 11:29
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As a Catholic I'm grateful to the Church for giving spiritual meaning to my life.
Through the ages, there has been no end of critics predicting the collapse of the Church. They've all been wrong.
"The gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
ajhauser
12/16/10 09:54
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Loved the article. Attention spans aren't what they used to be...